


Time Can Do So Much

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-10 20:50:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18668125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Peggy and Bucky on a mission, circa 1955.





	Time Can Do So Much

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Entwinedlove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Entwinedlove/gifts).



They drive twenty miles without speaking, and it's not until they pull into the gravel parking lot of the roadside motel -- one of the cheap ones that have sprung up like mushrooms along America's highway in these postwar years -- that Bucky speaks up suddenly, his voice gravelly with weariness. "I'll get the room."

Peggy, who is driving, glances over at him under the motel lights. He's been hunched over for the entire drive, his good arm wrapped around his ribs. "You're too memorable."

"And you aren't?" Bucky says dryly. "Trust me, nobody's gonna forget a woman in men's clothes, covered in other people's blood. At least I just look disreputable in the normal way."

She gives him a look, but it's not like she can argue. "Can you walk?"

"I can walk." He pats his pocket and then winces. "Got any cash?"

Peggy hands him a small wad of bills. He pulls himself together in a visible transformation, straightening his shoulders and swiping back the hair that's come completely undone from its neatly greased-down state earlier in the evening. He feels around in the backseat for his flat laborer's cap and pulls it down over his eyes. The glove goes on next, covering his metal hand. As he gets out of the car, he shoves his pistol into his pocket.

She waits in the car with a hand on her own gun until he comes back with the key.

 

*

 

The motel room is typical of its type: a bed, a nightstand, a small desk under the window. Everything smells chemical and new, yet looks slightly faded and scuffed already. The only luxury is a bathroom attached to the room, something Peggy would once have considered an amenity of the best hotels, now standard in even these cheap roadside motels across the whole country.

The world changes in large ways and small, she thinks.

They have no luggage to worry about. Bucky locks the door, while Peggy glances out the window and then draws the curtains. Bucky moves into the spot when she vacates it, looks out for a long while, with his hand in his pocket where the gun is.

"We weren't tailed," Peggy says, with more confidence than she actually feels. "We would have noticed other headlights on a highway at night. And they didn't have a chance to make our car."

Bucky grunts, and Peggy turns to frown at him.

"Let me look at it."

"I'm all right," Bucky says, straightening a little. The way he looks right now -- hair falling down to frame his face under the cap, dirt and bruises on his cheek and jaw -- makes her think unexpectedly of the first time she saw him after his presumed death in the war, back in 1946 when she'd been part of the team breaking him out of a Hydra facility in Belarus.

"You don't look it," she says.

Bucky smiles briefly, and the resemblance fades, because _that_ Bucky Barnes, the one rescued by the SSR nearly a decade ago, hadn't smiled at anyone. "You should see yourself right now."

Peggy reaches up a reflexive hand to touch her hair, pinned back and tucked under a cap at the start of the evening. By this point she's lost the cap, the hair is coming out of its pins, and she's just lucky that dirt and blood shouldn't stain too badly on the dark jacket and trousers she's wearing. Bucky's got a point about being the one to talk to the motel clerk if they don't want to be terribly memorable. He, at least, can pass for a somewhat scruffy laborer coming off a hard day. She looks like a woman dressed in men's clothes for sneaking around or other unsavory business.

Bucky clears his throat. "I didn't mean you look bad. I meant, you look like you could use the first turn cleaning up in the bathroom. That's all."

"You should quit digging your hole before you reach China, Agent Barnes," she says, smiling at him. "In any case, I saw you take some good hits, and I've nothing worse than some scrapes."

"I've had worse." He looks away as he says it, and flexes the gloved hand, with a whine of servos in the strangely lightweight-yet-strong, Hydra-built arm that even Howard's best scientists still don't know how to replicate.

"Bucky," she says, exasperated, "sit on the bed and let me make sure you aren't likely to bleed out on my watch, or are you going to make me order you?"

He takes a breath, holds it, then nods. The severe hitch in his step is painfully evident as he goes to the bed, and when he sits down even more stiffly, Peggy finds herself wanting, for some reason, to apologize.

Instead, she sits down behind him on the bed, one leg tucked under her hip, and helps him work off his half-burned, half-bloody shirt, leaving him in an undershirt that he obligingly lifts for her. She sucks in her breath at the sight of the purple bruises and visibly deformed ribs.

"It looks worse than it is," Bucky says over his shoulder. "No bleeding, see?"

"No _external_ bleeding, you mean," she mutters, probing lightly. He makes no sound, doesn't even move, and she wonders again, as she sometimes does, if Bucky even feels pain like most people do. She is pretty sure that he does. He's like Steve that way: he feels it, he just thinks he shouldn't. "How's the arm?"

"It's all right."

His gloved hand rests in his lap. He's been holding it oddly ever since they got out of the Leviathan facility, which might indicate damage that SHIELD can't fix. Peggy starts to reach for it, and he pulls it out of her reach. She draws her hand back.

"May I?"

Bucky hesitates for a moment, and she doesn't plan to ask again, but then he lightly places his metal hand in hers.

Peggy peels off the glove. Beneath it, blood and gore clog the bends in his metal joints. Not his blood, she reminds herself, but the memory is sharp and fresh: a Leviathan agent swinging a steel boathook toward her face, and Bucky coming out of nowhere, punching through the man's head.

"I need to clean this," he says, not looking at her. "Can't let it dry in there. Only got one of 'em, you know."

"I know." She sits back: she doesn't like knowing that he's in pain, but there's nothing she can do. "I can help you with that."

"I've got it."

"I know," she says, and she lightly squeezes his metal fingers. Her hands are filthy anyway; it doesn't matter. "I want to."

 

*

 

In the bathroom, under a harsh lightbulb above the sink, she washes his metal hand until the reddish water turns pale and swirls crystal-clear down the drain.

Bucky's not wrong, she thinks, glancing at herself in the mirror. She looks like hell. It's definitely been a night.

"I think it's clean," Bucky murmurs, flexing his fingers under the flow of water.

"You need to take care of it. Like you said, you've only got one."

He glances up from his metal hand under the water, to her face in the mirror. "And you've only got one face."

"I'm sorry?"

He takes his hand from under the flow of water, starts to raise it, then switches to the other hand and brushes her cheek with his flesh-and-blood fingertips, right under a vicious cut across her cheekbone. "That might scar."

"Oh, bollocks, no it won't. To quote you, I've had worse."

A smile tugs the corner of his mouth. " _You_ didn't accept that excuse either."

"Hoisted by my own petard," she sighs, and tilts her head as he wets a cloth and then dabs at the cut. He's smiling a little as he does it. "Is something funny, Agent Barnes?"

"Only thinking that I don't see you like this much," he says quietly. "Peggy."

Her entire body thrills to the sound of her given name, and she smiles. "How's that, Agent Barnes?"

"Through the cracks in your armor."

"Is that what you see?"

They have worked together often, particularly in the last couple of years. She's gotten in the habit of partnering with Bucky in the field. He's the strongest and most capable of her agents; it only makes sense to take him out with her. The director of SHIELD can afford nothing but the best protection.

That's the official reason, certainly.

And they have, in the past, flirted around this kind of thing. But she's never felt so close to it, here on the edge of an adrenaline drop from tonight's activities.

She can't help noticing how very close they are, Bucky in his undershirt, lightly wiping away the blood beneath her eye. It's not that she's never thought about him like this. It's only that she's the director of SHIELD and she can't afford this kind of entanglement.

But she's also the one who turns a blind eye to her agents doing this kind of thing. Because she knows what it's like, when your entire body thrums with energy seeking an outlet.

She knows the kind of intense emotional bonds that people form under pressure.

She knows that she's gotten to know Bucky Barnes as intimately as a person can know another over the last decade. She knows that he's loyal and brave. She knows that she appreciates him physically. She knows that she is intensely aware of the metal hand lightly touching her shoulder, the other hand licking across her cheek with the cloth.

And Bucky is smiling at her.

"What?" she asks, smiling back.

"You're like a cat," he says, swiping the cloth again, cleaning her smudged and dirty cheek. "Pet you the wrong way and get scratched. But right now you look like you're really enjoying the petting."

She rolls her eyes. He's still grinning, soft and fond.

She thinks that, in the beginning -- somehow, for some reason -- she expected him to be like Steve. Or at least, she expected someone serious, the quiet shadow of Steve that had been the only Bucky Barnes she knew during the war. And so he took her completely by surprise: the wicked sense of humor, the playful flirtation that somehow has seemed to become less of a joke over the last few years.

And now he is swiping her cheek with the cloth, until she raises a hand to catch lightly at his wrist.

"Bucky," she says gently, and turns her face up.

He freezes.

So it's like that, is it. Heaven help a girl for just wanting to be kissed once without having to take it for herself. But some things _are_ worth taking, so she stands on her tiptoes and kisses him securely and soundly on his parted, startled lips.

When she pulls away, he stares at her for a moment before saying, "Director Carter ..."

"Agent Barnes," she says quietly. "Did I misread the signals?"

"Er ... no ... but ..."

"If the words 'Steve's girl' cross your lips, so help me, Barnes ..."

"No ... no, I wasn't thinking that."

He looks almost guilty. She kisses him hard, before he changes his mind, and somewhere in the middle of that, his metal hand tangles in her hair without a second thought and he kisses her back with the same intensity that she feels in the pit of her stomach.

It's going to be a long night before they can find a phone to call SHIELD in the morning. And there's only one bed. She has no regrets.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Unchained Melody", which I have discovered IS in fact period-appropriate (sort of); it was recorded for the first time in the 1950s.


End file.
